Mekong Delta, Day 3
We were up early the next day to get a boat along the river to the famous Cairang floating market where all local wholesalers of fruit and vegetables bring their produce by boat to sell their wares to ‘middlemen’ also in boats. The boats were laden with produce and in order for people to know what they were selling, they all had a long pole sticking up in the air which had the produce attached to it so people could see what they were selling. Once they’d run out of something, they simply took that item off the pole. Simple but effective! It was very atmospheric cruising amongst the boats seeing all the hustle and bustle.
The last day’s cycling was the longest and when we got on our bikes in the morning we were knackered! My legs were still fine but my bum was really sore and the thought of 50+km that day was a bit daunting! the first stretch was a breeze though as we cycled right along the river under a green canopy of trees and flowers which was a welcome relief. We went through some really pretty villages and as with the first two days, were always accompanied by kids on bikes and hellos and friendly waves from everyone we passed!
We visited a Taoist temple and a crane sanctuary where there were literally 1000’s of cranes nesting in the trees. We had the option of having a Crane lunch (!) which we declined…
After a non-crane lunch we drove onto our next destination. The road we were supposed to take was closed as a bridge had collapsed so the one we had to take was ridiculously bumpy and busy and at times we were driving so close to the edge of the river that it felt like we were going to topple in. You wouldn’t want to fall in to the river as we later found out that during the typhoon earlier in the year, the waters had risen to high that one of the local crocodile farms had been flooded and approx 20,000 crocodiles had escaped into the river. Quite a few children had been killed by crocodiles in the villages that we past through, as they played in the water.
The last stretch of cycling that afternoon was about 45km and included one pretty big mountain to get up which looked even bigger than it was against the flat landscape of the rest of the Mekong Delta! As we were approaching the Cambodian border, the area that we were cycling through had a large Cambodian population as people had fled from Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge atrocities and the borders had been moved several times. They were obviously very, very poor. They people looked very different to the Vietnamese people we’d met in the rest of the country. They were really dark-skinned and their dress was different with many people wearing traditional Cambodian scarves. A lot of the elder women had shaved heads which I later found out was because they shave their heads when they are widowed.
We had all sorts of kids cycling along with us and talking to us as they came home from school or for others, from work. Some of them had to cycle 10Km to get to the nearest school and they’d do this journey twice a day. It made me realise as we cycled along for pleasure, just how important having a bike is to people in rural areas. for most, it’s their sole mode of transport and means the difference between going to school and getting an education or not. Without a bike, they can’t get an education and end up working the fields with their families to try and earn some money. We saw really young kids on massive bikes that were way too big for them, pedalling along or having a backy on someone else’s bike.
Despite being knackered, we pushed on and ended up covering the distance pretty quickly and even managed to make it up the mountain in one go – a downward slope has never felt so good!!!
It was really beautiful with huge fields full of palm trees stretching as far as the eye could see and as dusk fell it looked really magical.
We arrived in Chau Doc our final destination and had some well earned beers with Loc our guide who was a really nice guy. We then went and got some street food. It was so sad though as there was a very young boy on his own wandering around the market late at night trying to sell lottery tickets. He was looking hungrily at the food and hanging around the stalls so Loc bought him something to eat. He wolfed it down and gave us a big smile and it nearly broke my heart. What we didn’t know then though was that the poverty and hardships that we’d seen people facing in Vietnam as a direct result of the American Vietnam war, were almost going to pale in comparison to the situation in Cambodia and the stories that we’d hear.
The cycling trip was absolutely brilliant and was one of the highlights of our time in Vietnam and was the perfect way to scratch a bit deeper, get away from the more touristed Vietnam and see rural Vietnam in all it’s beauty.